Learning Power Abacus

Test page for re-inventing a thousand year old tool: to publish or patent--a hard question, especially if it means publishing before the patent (which would prevent a patent possibility).  What a moral dilemma!  And yet I would like to make teachig math easier for millions of teachers.

The Pleasures of Forgetting: Amnesia and << Anti-mémoire >>

John Strickland, Wednesday, March 7, 2012

     Sometimes I cannot bear to remember.  I know, I know—Plato said “all knowledge is a kind of remembering.”  The very Greek word for truth is “a-letheia”—literally “not-forgetting.”  And yet.  And yet I sometimes remember the many times I needed to forget in my life.  Pain, for example.  Who wants to remember every time he or she absent-mindedly grabbed a hot pot or a hot pan?  My mother was so absent-minded she kept an Aloe Vera plant growing on a shelf right next to her stove.  I wish she had known what I later discovered in my life—that keeping the burned portion of one’s hand in cold water or packed in ice meant not even so much as a blister.  Ah, the many blisters I have forgotten.  Thank God for a little moderate amnesia.

     Montaigne said, in a vein of philosophical detachment I have never been able to match, that he felt falling off a horse and losing consciousness was a good preparation for death.  One of those goals of philosophical meditation that, likewise, I have never quite mastered.  I tried, occasionally, to understand death and dying by lying down on a tombstone in a cemetery—at least as a teenager.  I just got cold from the marble and, after a while, a numb butt. I had to give it up before I got much understanding.  In truth—if that is permitted—I like to forget I am mortal.  Sophocles said it was one of the gifts of Prometheus to the human race.  The illusion of immortality made us rival the immortal gods.  No surprise that the gods punished Prometheus for that gift.  I think about that when I am standing by the ice rink at Rockefeller Center gazing at the blinding reflections from the golden statue of the “Teacher” which is located there.  An irony that the greatest teacher of the human race taught “letheia” rather than “a-letheia”—forgetting as one of our greatest gifts.

     Alas, forgetting is a gift that may not always keep on giving.  I can remember things now from my childhood that I would much rather forget.  Once, anticipating a spanking from my father, I put a book in my pants to dull the pain of the blows from my father’s doubled up belt.  Unfortunately, the belt snapped over the edge of the book under my clothing and stung me like a bee.  Of course, I always yelled louder than necessary to reduce the number of lashes.  Today it would be called “child abuse.”  It was all too normal a part of my childhood and that of my friends.  It helped me feel the utter injustice and total humiliation of lashes laid on slaves in the Old South.  Often I was not guilty of what I was whipped for.  I fear the violence of discipline in the South is a sad legacy of that ghastly inheritance of one group of human beings enslaving another.  I used to read all the Charles Atlas ads in my comic books, even sending off  for the instructions for body-building.  There came a time when my father knew he dare not so much as offer to whip me.  My muscles bulged on even my scrawny fifteen-year-old frame.  After he saw me tossing around automobile axles in a fit of temper in the backyard he knew I was no longer a mere child.  I am grateful he was quick of understanding.  Otherwise I might have been a just subject for one of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories as well as a member of a chain gang.

     No, I am grateful for forgetting.  Once while painting a room in a Harvard off-campus room I was able to remember what I had long suppressed—my deepest feelings about the humiliation of corporal discipline.  It was Christmas vacation and I stayed in Cambridge with another roommate while the other three went home.  We decided to re-paint our ghastly green living room while they were away.  Claude decided the painting would go better with some wine—a gallon of cheap red Tavola table wine with ice cubes to improve the taste (by numbing the tongue).  After a while he said he had something else which would make the job go even better.  He went upstairs and came down with a large hookah, the base filled with gin, so we smoked some Acapulco Gold filtered through gin while sipping wine and wielding our brushes.  We were about half way around the living room when we retired to two couches at opposite ends of the room while listening to the soothing sitar music of Ali Akbar Khan.  Soon I heard Claude snoring loudly across the room, his brush tipped over near the can of white paint.  I was, alas, wide awake, totally preoccupied with watching my feet move to the drums of the Indian music—all by themselves.  I seemed not to be in command of my feet and their movements.  Images were parading before my eyes every time I closed them, endless kaleidoscopes of juxtaposed images, fading into each other like a time lapse video of my past experience.  My censor dozed off with the wine and the images became poignant, cascading revelations which I could have done without.  I was utterly terrified to find myself taking an axe to my father, so startled that I fell on the floor to stop the kaleidoscope.  I am grateful I do not remember more.  I did finally fall asleep.  The room never got finished—half-ghastly green and half white with lots of visible paint strokes. I do not remember if it was ever finished.  I never tried a hookah again nor drank any cheap table wine.  Once is sometimes more than enough.